One of the problems with freelance writing full-time is that there isn’t a whole lot of room to be sick or even just feeling poorly for that matter. I don’t write well when I can’t focus – in fact, I don’t write at all. I was having some trouble with the upright position and holding down food this week, so my focus took a hit. This week was a bit of a wash, minus a few blog posts and bits and pieces.

Here, I suppose is a perfect example of why you MUST have a good chunk of money in your bank account to weather this kind of working life. (Which I don’t, but I am making it a priority.) You don’t really have room for weeks that are hard fought writing when you are freelancing.  I suppose another way to help is to have paid work that doesn’t take so much brain space. It’s not a bad idea to have some lesser paying jobs that require less brain space and are more tedious. (Another thing I should probably make a priority.) No work means – no money. No one is paying for sick time if you take it.

So now that I’m back up to speed, I’m hoping I can have a double-time week.  Next week I hope, will look like I’m going gangbusters writing.

Writing Derailments:

Feeling ill absolutely destroyed my writing week. I also think I’m having some major issues believing the nearly-finished novel that’s on my desk is good enough to finish, but I’ll finish it. This is what I would tell my amazing students in my memoir class… the most important thing you can do is finish your work. If it’s awful, if it’s not as good as what you have written before, so be it. You can’t learn and grow to your best potential as a writer if you don’t finish what you start.

Writing Highlights:

Looks like there is a contract in the works to do a Puppy Bowl book in the same vein as the TOO CUTE! Kittens and TOO CUTE!: Puppies books I finished recently. That will be a spectacularly fun project! I love looking at photos of adorable baby animals and storyboarding them!!

We are coming up on my last week of the memoir class I’ve been teaching at the Banning Library and I am so in love with my students. I am see some of the most heartfelt and heart-risking work I’ve ever read come of this my ten-week class and am both in awe and inspired by the women who have been trusting me with their stories. Bravo ladies!!

I was equally in adoration of my tiny writing group of three trusted friends. We met this week and I felt refreshed and ready to get back to the page afterwards. If you don’t have a close group of writers who you trust with your work, find them!! I firmly believe great writers find peers who inspire, encourage and push them to take their writing to the next level.

So, Face the page, Brave Writers! Until next week….

Also check out this week’s post on the Inlandia blog on landscape as inspiration.

As I start my weekly blog post over on the Inlandia Literary Journey’s blog, it occurred to me that sometimes the most encouraging thing to a writer is to see that they aren’t the only one struggling. It seems to me that the fight and the struggle to get the work done never goes away. At least not for me. I hear that some people simple sit down and write when they are supposed to be writing. I often wish I were them, even if they are mythical creatures. So here begins my first check in for my writing week.

I have plenty of deadlines that are looming, yet on Sunday, I wrote the first short story I’ve written in almost a year. I meant it to be a 500 word exercise, but in the end found myself hours later, holding a short story. I came back to it several times over the week, revising and then sent it out for submission on Firday. I’d be really proud about this if I didn’t have a proposal for a literary nonfiction book to rewrite and three chapters left of a novel I’ve been working on for five years. I hate that I do that sometimes. I hate it when I don’t finish things, but I try to forgive myself for at least getting something done. I really love this short story. Chances are it needs some more distance and tinkering, but it’s still counts as an accomplishment. Can you hear me trying to convince myself? I am trying to get better about forgiving and encouraging myself. I’m not very good at that:

Writing Derailments:

On Tuesday I was finally given permission to announce that I’m a top 100 finalist competing on MasterChef. To my surprise the press release and the reality of it sent me into a state of anxiety. I’ll write about it someday, but this week all I could do was pace around the house muttering “I don’t want to be on TV. I don’t want to be on TV.”

On Wednesday, Banning caught on fire, a big blazing 2000 acre swathe of wilderness behind my house, threatening friends and ravishing my hiking/hunting wilderness. It was hard to think about anything else, but the fire.

Neither of these things are good reasons not to get writing done, but here I am.

Writing Highlights:

I learned a ton about memory studies while working on a blog for NatGeo’s show Brain Games. I love this show! If you aren’t watching it, you should be!

The best moment of the week however, was signing a contract that I have been waiting on since the beginning of the year. I’m excited to be (ghost)writing a memoir about Judy Fridono and her magical and inspirational surfdog/fundraising champ Ricochet. In fact, I’m going to go see Ricochet surf on Sunday while ESPN films.

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Of course…. I still have to write it, right! Here’s hoping for a more productive week and wishing you the same.

Face the page, Brave Writers! I’ll meet you there.

I knew when I won the week-long stay in Sedona, Arizona exactly what I would do with it…. WRITE. I would consider it a free writer’s retreat, a gift from my recalcitrant muse. “Here. Have a pretty place to write. Now quite effing whining to me and do it yourself.”

So here I am, the second day here, trying to write. Writing is not easy, no matter how beautiful the place, how free of distractions, how desperately you want the novel to be finished. I’m trying though…

Yesterday, I got groceries. I took a few minutes to marvel over the amazing red rocks. I took a long bath in the gloriously large tub in the condo where I’m staying. I ate food I probably shouldn’t have and consumed a crazy amount of caffeine.I took a nap. And ultimately I went to bed early.

The writing just wasn’t coming. Where to start? How to finish a book begging to be finished, but determined not to end? I doodled on the first page of a Moleskine my good friend Jessica Lawrence sent me in a package of New Year’s goodies, thinking about how strangely the same beginnings and endings can be. Then I took my newly decorated notebook, a pen and the manuscript and re-read the first 60,000 words of my novel. I let go of the fact I should be writing and read instead.

I treated it like another author’s book and jotted down sentences that caught me as I wrote, not so much as encouragement, be re-embracing the heart of the story. The lines were ones like these, no so much graceful prose as moments I found myself caught up in again:

• “Quit being a cowboy, McClane, I’ve got this.”
• “My heart in the belly of this new world, I felt myself still and let go.”
• “Hunting required energy. Energy required calories. These were the new and wickedly simple mathematics of my life.”
• “I’ve always suspected that you were my Bolson,” Branson said, but he wasn’t smiling.
• “This place is wilder than I imagined. I think we are wilder than I imagined.”

Writing a book is a long relationship for me, a relationship that sometimes doesn’t a make it. Sometimes I fall out of love. There are at least four half-finished book manuscripts languishing in my file cabinet. Not every manuscript survives the tumult of living with me.

All the same, twice while I was re-reading this partial novel, Park West, I found myself in tears. I fell in love again with the story I am trying to write and I was so very relieved by this. I don’t know if anyone else will cry, or love those same words and moments in my Moleskine and honestly I don’t care. It doesn’t belong to you yet. For now, it is wholly and completely mine. Right now it’s a story I’m telling myself. I wonder why we as writer’s don’t spend more time enjoying this place, these few minutes when we can be jealous lovers.

I only wrote a few sentences yesterday, but for me the bigger part of writing a book happens off the page. I’m here now, though. I’m writing a story I’m going to finish.